Question 1
Evaluate the interpretations in both of the two passages and explain which you think is the more
convincing explanation of Hussite success in the Hussite wars up to 1431.
Passage A
Sigismund, King of the Romans and King of Hungary, came quickly with an army of Hungarians and Austrians to try to secure the throne of the country (Bohemia) whose resources were so essential to his plans; he came too to destroy the religious revolt. He did, in fact, force his way into the castle of Prague in the year 1420, where the Archbishop crowned him, but the people of the city, reinforced by the armies of the peasants who poured in from Tabor and Horeb, quickly drove him out. Jan Zizka, gentleman and professional soldier and most zealous follower of Huss, defeated his effort to enter the Old Town and drove him out of the country. Sigismund never gave up his attempts to get back the Bohemian throne. He organised invasion after invasion, from Hungary, from Austria, Saxony, Bavaria… but every invasion was defeated by bloody battles. Zizka and, after his death in 1424, his successor, the Hussite priest Prokop the Shaven, organised the mightiest military instrument hitherto devised, the wagon laager, armed with pikemen, small arms and primitive howitzers, impenetrable when defending and overwhelming when attacking. Such terror did these armies of the ‘warriors of God’ strike into the invading crusaders, that the armies which Cardinal Beaufort led in 1427 and, the last of the anti-Hussite crusades, that which the papal legate, Cardinal Cesarini, led to Domazlice in 1431, fled at the mere sound of the approach of Prokop’s army.
Adapted from: D. Hay, Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (2nd edition) published in 1989.
Passage B
In February (1420) Sigismund decided for an expedition which was declared a Crusade by Martin V. In Breslau he demonstrated his new attitude to Bohemian heresy by agreeing to the burning of a Hussite merchant from Prague. He marked the contrast between him and Wenceslas by overturning Wenceslas’ mild response to a revolt of workers’ corporations against the town council in Breslau.
The crusade of Sigismund did what nothing else could do; it pushed into temporary unity the divided forces of Hussitism. In Prague, the Old and New Town came together setting up a form of military government. The citizens sent out a manifesto which struck the nationalist chord. Sigismund was to be repelled, as he had summoned a crusade and had called in the Germans, ‘our natural enemies’. As the crusaders made their way into the country, national feeling was reinforced by stories of martyrdom of humble Hussites.
Sigismund seems to have believed that the Hussite unity would break down, but this was sadly to underestimate both the general suspicion of him as the betrayer of Huss and the Czech national feeling against the Germans and Hungarians in his entourage. Every crusade – and there were such expeditions in 1420, 1421, 1422, 1427 and 1431 – pushed the parties into unity to repel the invader. Bohemia was a beleaguered country alone. The moderates could not be sure of defending it; they had to sink their differences with the radicals to keep their independence and the lay chalice in being. Both Tabor and the moderates could, together, defend the bastion of Bohemia against any army that the Catholics, often ill-led, were able to put against them, earning in the process such a reputation for Hussite troops that opposing forces sometimes dissolved at the mere sight of them.
Adapted from: M. Lambert, Medieval Heresy (3rd edition), published in 2002.
[30]
Answer
